Page 7 of East

He’s literally riding a white stallion.

Where have you been all my life?

I click on his profile. Twistr doesn’t allow its users to input much information. Just a name, sexual orientation, and location.

This guy is looking to date women, and lives in Chicago. Good. Not interested in anything long distance.

His name? Bobby Q.

I scrunch my forehead. Sounds like “barbecue.”

I’ll lead with that. We can share a laugh over our first drink. He looks like a guy who knows his way around a grill. I can imagine him searing thick slabs of steak on a sizzling summer day, wiping the sweat from his brow. Bare-chested, of course.

Is it getting hot in here?

I’ll message him.

Except Twistr doesn’t have a chat feature. All you can do is request a date and time to meet.

I check the time. A little before seven. I can doll myself up—I still have my makeup on from the news studio; I’ll just have to touch it up a bit—and be ready for a date around eight o’clock tonight. It’s Thursday, so I’m not expecting him to be available if he works tomorrow. I have a work event tomorrow night—blah—so it’s either tonight or we wait until Saturday.

I put the information in, and a few seconds later the app beeps.

Bobby is also available to meet starting at eight.

It’s getting real!

Wherever we’re going, it’s a half hour away, so the app tells me to be ready to leave around seven-thirty. It’ll automatically schedule a rideshare to pick me up at my place then. It won’t tell me where I’m going, and I won’t find out until we arrive at our destination.

My hair stands on end at the thought. This sounds too good to be true. Is there a catch?

I quickly search Google for more reviews of the app. Mostly five stars, with people saying they’ve been taken places they never would have gone on their own, that the Twistr app awoke something in them they didn’t know was there. The few bad reviews are from people who had bad dates or didn’t enjoy the places they were sent. But you run that risk no matter where you go.

My concerns put at ease, I start to get ready.

And for the first time in months, I’m excited about a date.

I’m wearing my favorite outfit, a cocktail dress in a blue and white gingham print. It’s vintage, the only thing left to me by my mother. The woman who died in childbirth before I could ever meet her. Emmy took most of her belongings for herself when she married my father, but she didn’t take this. She said it made her look like a “slutty farm girl.”

Which, to be fair, it kind of does. The dress itself is quite nice, so I don’t quite look like a Halloween stereotype, but the gingham print screams country.

So maybe I look like a sexy farm girl. But you know what? I am a sexy farm girl.

Despite all the bullshit and baggage I carry with me from my childhood, a part of me will always be the little girl from Kettle Springs.

And I love this dress. The one gift my mother gave me.

That and my name.

Dorothea Gaelynn Storm.

Dorothea was a name she always liked. She had some distant great-grandsomething with that name, and she told my father it was timeless.

My middle name, Gaelynn, was her name. I’m proud to carry it.

I scan myself in the mirror. This dress makes my boobs look amazing. I was already gifted in that area—Emmy was transparently jealous of me from the time I started budding—but this dress pushes them up and out to a new level.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my makeup when my phone buzzes. My ride is here. I guess the app connects through Uber or Lyft and takes care of the ride for me. Cool stuff.